Life used to be simple: Your company was a Mac shop or a Windows shop. These days, the line between the two platforms is blurring, with many organizations using servers and workstations of both platforms for various functionalities. Ryan Faas explains some simple ways for system administrators to reduce the headaches of a multiplatform business.

A little over a decade ago, businesses and institutions tended to be strictly
Mac-based or Windows-based. The IT department supported a single platform
because the servers used the same platform as the user computers they
supported—Windows NT for PC organizations, AppleShare IP for Mac shops.
The exception tended to be those organizations that relied on Novell, which
provided servers that supported both Windows and Mac operating systems.

Over the intervening years, much has changed and that single-OS attitude has
faded. Novell's market share for servers has dwindled and Apple's
market share lessened enough by the mid- to late 1990s that relatively few
Mac-only organizations still existed. In their place were organizations that
included both Mac and Windows workstations, often separated by departments. At
the time, it was often the burden of the Mac users (or the Mac technical staff)
to maintain interoperability with the larger population of PC users in an
organization. Schools and design companies provided the occasional exception by
remaining strong Mac loyalists.

In the years since Mac OS X was first introduced, things have shifted again.
Apple has developed a reliable and powerful server platform in Mac OS X Server
and in hardware solutions such as Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Xsan. Both Apple and
Microsoft offer excellent cross-platform products in their server lines. And
Apple has even built all the required tools for cross-platform life directly in
the mainstream version of Mac OS X.

All this platform-crossing activity leads us to the questions facing many
system administrators who support mixed-platform infrastructures:

Do we need to remain dedicated to Windows servers or Mac OS X servers?

What's the benefit in maintaining a single-server platform throughout
the organization?

If we choose to integrate platforms, how do we make sure that Windows
servers and Mac OS X servers get along?

This article provides some simple answers to these
questions—particularly for small to medium-sized networks—as well as
resources for dealing with larger and more complex situations. But before we get
to those questions, let's look at the common ways in which Macs and Windows
PCs can be supported in a single-server platform environment.

Mac OS X and the Windows Server Environment

Mac OS X is well designed to exist in a Windows infrastructure. Apple has
included support for accessing shared files and printers using the SMB protocol
(the native protocol for Windows clients and servers):

You can easily search a Windows network by going to the Network globe in
the Finder and browsing through various Windows domains, workgroups, and
servers—in much the same way as you can using My Network Places on
a Windows workstation.

You can just as easily elect to search for shared printers using SMB in
the Print Setup Utility. If you open the Directory Access application, you
can configure the SMB/CIFS plug-in to assign Workgroup membership to a Mac
OS X computer on a Windows network (see Figure 1). You can configure the
computer to access a specific WINS server for resolving the NetBIOS names
of Windows computers on a network that includes multiple subnets. (All of
which you can do in the System Properties and network connection properties
of a Windows PC.)

Figure 1 Specifying
a WINS server by using the Directory Access utility in Mac OS X.

Going a step further, Apple has included the ability to join Mac OS X computers
to an Active Directory domain, allowing you to use Active Directory user accounts
for login access to Mac workstations. You can also configure home directory
access to be shared with a Windows home directory stored on a server within
the Active Directory domain. This ability, which can be configured in a number
of ways depending on the Active Directory configuration and the needs of the
users, makes Macs nearly equal players with PCs on a completely Windows-based
network.

Of course, these are all Apple offerings. Microsoft also provides Services
for Mac with its Windows NT 4, 2000, and 2003 server lines. This capability
allows you to configure share points and print queues to be shared with Mac
clients using the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), the native file-sharing protocol
for Mac OS X and classic Mac OS versions (as well as the legacy AppleTalk file-
and printer-sharing protocol). Services for Mac has some limitations, though;
it requires extra attention by server administrators, and it doesn't support
any direct interaction between the Mac workstation and Active Directory (that
is, user login to the workstation or home directory access). But it's
a no-cost option if you need to support older Macs.